


Nightmare

by twitchtipthegnawer



Series: Overwatch Oneshots [9]
Category: Overwatch (Video Game)
Genre: Extremely Dubious Consent, Gen, Heavy Angst, Male-Female Friendship, Murder as a form of therapy, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Reaper76 if you squint, Self-Harm, Suicidal Thoughts
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-08-10
Updated: 2016-08-10
Packaged: 2018-08-07 22:27:14
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,291
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7732096
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/twitchtipthegnawer/pseuds/twitchtipthegnawer
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Amelie wishes she could turn her body off. Gabriel wishes he could turn his mind off. They're a strange pair, a couple of battered flags someone left on the battlefield long after the blood soaked into the soil. Somehow, they haven't decayed yet, but neither is sure why.</p><p>(Alternatively: "Widowmaker's outfit is 'cause everyone in Talon is a perv." Is not in fact a funny joke.)</p>
            </blockquote>





	Nightmare

**Author's Note:**

> Read! The! Tags! This is almost a character study, though really it's a way for me to get out a few headcanons. And they are _dark_ headcanons, so please be safe if this kinda content is tough for you to read. And if you've got any comments at the end, or requests/prompts, don't hesitate to speak up please :"")

She doesn’t really dream anymore.

Sleep is something Amelie does because her visor beeps at her. She doesn’t really get tired anymore, either, and even if she did she suspects that she’s often too busy to notice. Missions would run her ragged, without the quiet alarm reminding her when to rest.

Sometimes, though, it goes off when she can’t sleep. It’s not often; her handlers have a better grasp of her needs than she does, and they try to keep her out of missions when she runs the risk of passing out. But when the superiors at Talon ask her to do something specific, she can’t exactly say no.

It usually isn’t a problem. The things they ask her for are boring and small and predictable, and often over rather quickly. But this time around Amelie’s visor has been beeping for three hours, and the crowd around her is barely thinner than it was at the beginning. She isn’t entirely sure if it’s a crowd. It’s been harder to define words inside her own head, for the past thirty minutes.

Half an hour. Thirty minutes. How long has her visor been beeping again?

 _”Fuck,”_ she hears around her. It’s in a variety of languages, Talon as international as Overwatch had been. Her body is limp as she’s manhandled into new positions. Usually, they want her to participate, but this time they’re content to let her lie there.

While they babble and groan and make any number of slightly distasteful noises, Amelie thinks about her next mission. That’s normal, something she often does when an officer requests this of her. Are they called officers? Amelie doesn’t particularly care, but the inexact nature of her language at the moment annoys her.

Much better to focus on death, then. Death is a simple, easy word. It means the same thing whether you’re an omnic or a human or a Widowmaker. Possibly the only person for whom death means something different is the Ziegler woman. Possibly it means something different for Reaper, too. But neither of them matter, especially at the moment, so Amelie thinks about death.

She thinks about the tiny, clean hole a sniper’s bullet makes on entry. She thinks about the blown out craters of older guns, the swiss cheese flesh of buckshot, the fact that she likely loves guns despite not being sure what love is. She thinks about the life fading out of her victims’ eyes, and the way that omnic’s lights flicker instead of fading but it’s the exact same thing. She thinks it’s ironic that she can barely tell the difference between omnics and humans, some days.

Somehow she goes from thinking about mission objectives to thinking of the men above her. She thinks they’re all men-- she’s not sure, impreciseness prickling at her, but she thinks. It’s usually men. Either way she catches their blissed out eyes and watches them glaze over, watches pupils blow out and irises roll back. She watches their faces contort in pleasure and thinks that pain is very similar, but death would be better because their expressions would go slack and then she could _sleep._

Not that she particularly wants sleep. But she does want death, always wants death, and she also wants the visor to stop beeping. So annoying. Annoying, annoying, annoying, annoying, annoying, someone turn it _off._

It takes four men to drag her away from the corpse whose vertebrae she’d been breaking one by one, and another man falls dead to the floor before they inject her with enough sedative to make her pass out. It’s not exactly sleep, but she’ll take it, and whatever punishment is lined up for her when she wakes up won’t bother her at all.

After all, what are they going to do? Kill her?

♠

He doesn’t really feel anymore.

Sometimes he wakes up in a cold sweat, and only knows it’s a cold sweat because the fucking name is the temperature description. They kept his nerves as intact as they could, but if they’d actually reconstructed most of them they’d have left him a writhing mass of pain. Instead they left him mostly numb, and he _hates_ it.

The worst parts are the dreams, because in those he can feel. Everything from a friendly clap on the shoulder, to a lover’s kiss on his cheek. All _gone._ And not even because he’d been an asshole and driven people away, this time.

Amelie’s the only one who seems to notice when the numbness gets to him. She says it reminds her of how she doesn’t dream anymore, but in reverse. She doesn’t miss anything, from the time before she was Widowmaker, but a piece of her wants to. He misses everything, and wants to tear the world apart for it.

Instead he tears himself apart. The way his body heals is less like healing and more like re-forming, so the knife doesn’t feel quite the same cutting through his body. There’s less resistance, as he automatically de-materializes at the threat of damage. Of pain.

He uses the excuse of habit despite knowing that it’s absurd. He hadn’t done this since high school, before Switzerland. At first he quit because bathing communally with the other army recruits meant no privacy, and then he’d quit because Jack would hold his hands with that worry in his eyes. Amelie doesn’t remember that, though, or maybe he never told her-- he’s not sure, but it doesn’t fucking matter, ‘cause either way she doesn’t care.

Fire burns him up from the inside when he gets the news halfway through the fifth cut. It crackles over the comm line. The best tech in the world, rendered about as understandable as something from the 1900’s thanks to the conflicting signal Reyes’ body sends out.

They leave him to pick her up from sickbay, her handlers busy doing something else with some other brainwashed sod. Reyes has handlers too, but they’ve long since given up on actually handling him. If he wants to teleport away, he will, and he’s still capable of wanting things a way that most of their dumb army wasn’t.

Even when he’s lifting Amelie’s corpse-cool body from the cot and carrying her to her room, he doesn’t count her as part of the dumb army. She’s quick as a whip. Sharp as the knife he has in his coat pocket. Her mind might be a venomous mine, poisoning her when she makes the wrong move, but it’s still _there._

Case in point, the stunt she pulled that got her sedated in the first place. Reyes considers just leaving with her, quitting Talon entirely, but it’s about as brainless an idea as anything the witless underlings could’ve come up with. Talon is _convenient._ For both of them.

Talon is convenient for not locking Amelie up, as much as it is convenient for letting her kill in a way that is both frequent and purposeful. Talon’s also convenient for Gabriel, because it gives him access to resources. Resources like Jack Morrison’s whereabouts.

If he felt a little worse for her, he might’ve offered Amelie the chance to kill Jack instead. But he knew better by now. Events like the one today upset her, but not in any tangible way, and one kill was as good as the next. She’d gotten two today, which meant twice as much satisfaction as Jack could give her.

And besides. Reyes was a bit of a selfish bastard, when he let himself be. Lately, he’d let himself be quite a bit. Killing Jack would be the icing on the cake of ruining Overwatch a second time.

After that, though, he’s not sure what he’ll do. Because it’s not like he can die anymore, can he?


End file.
